


Turing Test

by tzigane, Zaganthi (Caffiends)



Category: Prometheus (2012)
Genre: Androids, F/M, Uncanny Valley
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-02
Updated: 2012-12-02
Packaged: 2017-11-20 02:59:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/580557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tzigane/pseuds/tzigane, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caffiends/pseuds/Zaganthi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"No. Dismissed, David." She kept walking and wished that he wouldn't follow her. The likelihood of that was extraordinarily slim, and his footsteps behind her were telling. Of course he wouldn't miss anything that his creator had to say, even if it was meant for her ears.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Turing Test

**Author's Note:**

  * For [diadelphous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/diadelphous/gifts).



There was no leaving the shadow of greatness.

It had been the bane of children of the exceedingly successful since success had been a concept. She supposed that once upon a time cave men had struggled with being the children of Ogg, the unparalleled rock craftsman who had also fashioned the first rudimentary cart. It was a constant cold shiver along the skin when someone looked at her, that glance that summed her up and then tossed her away without truly considering who she was or how she could be anything but the lesser of two.

Inevitability, she supposed, went alongside the belief that someone like Peter Weyland was omniscient in his brilliance, an ineffable entity that would never be equaled.... particularly when she was only a woman.

Time passed and things changed, and nothing ever truly changed because it was always there in the backs of their minds. It was hardwired into their DNA, she would have said, but that was before David.

David had no DNA. David was a creature of programming, of literal hard wiring, of the hands of one man reaching into him and setting him on a path. He was also a commercial failure in many respects, though Peter Weyland would never admit it.

Not when his very own David was so perfectly and carefully constructed.

It was a memory, the sight of him, carefully putting things together, coding, working. The insides had never looked like anything to her more than they looked like milk and cold spaghetti, and the explanation for the carefully crafted bio-organics made her want to ask so many questions, all of them starting with the word _why_.

Why robotics when they could be making prosthetics? Why robotics when Weyland Corporation could be saving lives? Why robotics at all, because it had always seemed grotesque to her, and Meredith Vickers had never once asked him. The word had never fallen from her lips because she knew better. She knew the answer.

_Because this is what I want to do_.

It was how he had revolutionized warfare, and space travel, and colonization. It was how they were branching out into terraforming, and while she could see the numbers, could predict accurately which business lines would succeed and which would fail, and when, exactly, they would need to begin to cooperate with Yutani Corp to keep corporate interests from becoming a war, she lacked the... interest to create. It wasn't in her.

She just wanted to do business. Good business, prosperous business. She wanted to rule the world with a velvet-covered fist because she was such a success, and she had always been sure that was why he was so completely disappointed in her. He had wanted a clone rather than an individual. A rival, perhaps, another genius, and he failed to recognize her different strand of genius. Failed and snubbed it even as she clawed her way up the ranks of his board.

And then those insane archeologists with their half cocked scheme had come along.

She had honestly wanted to.... oh, she hadn't known. Kill him on the trip, she supposed. Let him die, hoped for him to die in stasis, just because she hated him so deeply and sincerely. Funny, that she and David would have that in common -- their general hatred of the father they shared, and wouldn't that upset the people who had so many things to say about Weyland's robotics division?

And yet they reached their destination in one piece. For good or for ill, they were there.

And everyone, every last person, was heaving and puking up their guts.

All of them. Except for her.

Lazy fuckers, she'd thought at first. Lazy fuckers, none of whom were fit enough for asteroid duty, never mind an expedition like that. They hadn't prepared. They hadn't known what to expect.

That's what she told herself, anyway. What she thought. More like what she hoped, because the realization that something was wrong was there. Horribly, dreadfully there, niggling at the back of her mind, haunting her. She drank her nutrients, then switched to hot tea and considered their goal, their waste of time. Her business sense said there might be artifacts of terraforming, technology they could use.

Every other sense she had screamed at her to stop fucking worrying about business and start digging through the databases to see what she could find.

"Ma'am."

"Yes?" She looked up, jaw set, because before he had even spoken she'd known who it was. Well. What it was.

His smile was plastic, and it never, ever reached those eyes. "He is asking for you, ma'am. Before the expedition leaves the ship."

Unbelievable. Still in stasis, still ruling their lives with a sharp mind and an iron fist. "Did he tell you anything?" They'd had the whole time in stasis, after all, and David had a... A natural snoop's tendencies.

Programmed that way. Sneaky little fucking bastard, and she hated him. Somehow, she hated him even more at the moment.

"No, ma'am. He did not." His mouth spread in a slow smile that was nothing like reassuring. "But you know how he is."

Unbelievably snippy bitch of a robot. She stood up and brushed past him to head to the stasis pod where Weyland laid, and had been waiting since the mission had been set in stone.

"Is there anything I can do for you, ma'am?" Anyone else would think that question was an interest in helping them.

"No. Dismissed, David." She kept walking and wished that he wouldn't follow her. The likelihood of that was extraordinarily slim, and his footsteps behind her were telling. Of course he wouldn't miss anything that his creator had to say, even if it were meant for her ears. He never had, not since his creation. He hung off of the man's every word, loyal to a fault, and she certainly faulted him for it, for being unable to realize that he was in control of his logic circuits, not some old man who was looking for a way out of dying just so that he could fuck up her life a little bit longer.

The only reason she'd gone with him was because if it became some lost expedition... She wanted to know what happened. She had to keep his myth at bay. It was already too much for the company to cope with, the overwhelming presence of him and his need to rule it absolutely.

Every step was haunted by David's presence. He stepped in time with her, one, two, three, four, and she took a deep breath as she paused before the door.

God, she didn't want to see him.

"Isn't there a floor you can clean?" She stopped with a hand on the door.

"I had a great deal of time to clean floors, ma'am. And many other things." And clearly time to dye his hair. Badly. She could see that his roots were a different color than the rest of his hair, and it had been some cheap chemical mix, but apparently when one was a bored robot... She turned around, shut him out, and reached for the helm on the shelf instead.

Slipping it on was a sickening vertigo as if the world tilted on its edge, leaving her blind and subject to whatever crap had been programmed into it so that David could use it. So that humans could use it. She had no idea. "I'm here."

"Have you found them yet?" First words out of his metaphorical mouth. Unbelievable and yet.

"The search will commence within the next few hours. Right now, all any of us can say is that if they were here, there are no visible signs that they are currently." Oh, and she hoped to god that they were all dead, every last one of them. Just thinking about it made her heart swell.

"But they were here," he repeated. No, she wasn't sure. They hadn't touched down yet, and she didn't want to, not immediately. What she wanted was to tell him it was all a useless, ridiculously expensive trip. What she wanted was to slit his throat and set herself free.

She hated repeating herself. He knew it, too. "There are no visible signs that they are here at this time, and until we get closer, we won't know if they were ever here."

"I want to make first contact with them," he stressed from a visual that warped and then became concrete, a hard, stern office that solidified into unfolding. "And if they are amenable, then the archeologists can have them."

Hated him. Hated, hated, hated, and wanted him to die. "I recall you saying as much the first time." And the second. And the third, and she reached up and pulled the helm from her head.

He'd get them first, if they existed at all. And if they didn't, she was waiting with glee to come back and tell him that it had been a waste of his last few moments of life.

_Glee _.__

____

____

"Ma'am." There was David, waiting patiently with a lack of motion that always, always showed that he was anything but human.

She scowled at him, smacked his shoulder with hers as she passed. That it didn't cause her pain, just pressure, was something else that made her nerves knot tighter.

Meredith wasn't going to think about it.

~*~*~*~

David did have his uses, as occasionally annoying as she found him. Particularly in the wake of their, their ruin, their discontent. Their failed fucking discovery, because they were not only dead, but they'd clearly been in the throes of a scientific lockdown to stop the spread of some contagion.

Sometimes it was vitally necessary to celebrate the fact that life still flowed in her veins. The fact that it probably wouldn't if things didn't get better in short order, well.

Her skin was slick with sweat, pulse racing, and god. Clearly she should have found a better place to hide the necessities.

"Is this acceptable, ma'am?"

"You're a mood killer, David." And her sex toys back home didn't talk, which wasn't actually a capability that a sex toy needed. Even if he were fully functional.

"Then I will do my best to change that." Change it with his ridiculously talented tongue, apparently. Again. It was a much better use for it than talking, especially with those fingers. God, yes. Yes, it had clearly been a while, because just the two of them felt like so much.

She leaned back on her palms, one leg over his shoulder, stretching into it. His fingers weren't moving much -- just enough. Just, just enough. His tongue was better, flicking lightly over her clit with a motion that stole her breath and made her shake. A crook of his fingers later and it was so, so close. So close.

There might have been a little vibration thrown in, a pressure that no human seemed to do right, only David, with his fingers buried all the way into her tight cunt.

God.

Fuck.

Fuck, and that was, that was perfect. That was one hell of an orgasm, ripped up from the depths of her, making her shake and shudder and lose all control, and just when she thought it would back off, his fingers moved faster, third one added, and oh god.

As long as he wasn't talking, he was the best sex toy she'd ever used. It just kept going and going, until she could only _feel_ it, feel him, until she started to push him back. Push him away, and then he was crawling his way up her body, and she didn't have what it took to keep pushing. Not when he was forging inside of her, hands on either side of her shoulders, hair falling haphazardly into his forehead, and fuck. Fuck, fuck, that was big, that was good, that was insanely good.

It was precisely what she wanted, quick, not dirty but _quick_ effective, efficient sex, a pounding like she could get nowhere else. Steady, heavy thrusts, deep, and he was looking at her, all bright eyes and cheap dyed hair, and it was almost distracting enough to bother her, but honestly.

It was just too fucking good.

~*~*~*~

After Holloway's death, she needed to wash. She'd needed to get the smell of burnt skin and screams out of her nose, she needed to face the fact that the aliens were alive and well -- or at least their bio problems were -- and that David was playing her against Weyland.

Now if only she felt anything like surprised by that fact.

Instead, there was a soft, dull throb somewhere in her head, and it just kept building. _Wrong, wrong, wrong_ , a running litany that sang in her veins and that was settling badly.

This was all going to go straight to hell. Clearly she hadn't been in her right mind when she decided coming here was a fantastic alternative to staying behind and digging away at the foundations of everything Weyland had left behind. She should have stayed behind. She should have let him die with a crushed hope on his lips, except there was failure, the vacancy of hope, and then there was watching a member of her crew morph into something horrible, inhuman. 

There was no fear, though. She wasn't afraid, just angry and sad and disappointed that it had come to that. Disappointed in the whole fucking thing, and the fact that she wasn't afraid seemed to be a pretty clear indicator that she was so completely abnormal there were no words. That little bit of reality was more likely to make her afraid than what was going on around them.

"You didn't have to set him on fire."

Except clearly she had needed to do exactly that.

She turned, spiking anger, towel half wrapped in her hair as she tried to dry herself. There was no need to be modest; he had already seen it all, and it had been an exceptional experience. Only David could have been as good, and he was nothing but a machine. "Yes, I did. Yes, I did -- did you see his skin? Infected on an alien planet? We made those protocols for this moment."

He sighed, heavy and frustrated. "Yeah. Yeah, I know, but chrissakes. You coulda waited until I managed to get Shaw out of the way. She didn't need to see that. Not everybody's hard as you." Never mind the way he reached out, thumb rubbing along the crease of her elbow and down her arm.

She didn't feel hard just then. Or scared, but miserable, not... not guilty. She couldn't place it. "He was mutating right there. He might have exploded, like the head. I don't have to explain myself to you."

The nod that got her was unexpected. She had expected more of an argument. "Yeah. I know. I know, you don't have to explain anything, but it'd be nice if I had a fair knowledge of just what the hell is going on underneath all of this. It's pretty clear something is."

She inclined her head slightly, even as she dropped the towel to the floor. "The very company itself rides with us, Janek."

"The compa... holy fucking shit, Vickers. The... And you're here? Seriously? What the hell were you thinking? 'cause I ain't exactly a corporate type, here, but seems to me you'd have been helluva lot better off if you'd stayed back with the board of directors."

"Yes, that has occasionally crossed my mind." She gave him a brittle smile that she felt every cracked, fracturing centimeter of. "There's one remaining in a stasis pod. We'll make contact, and then god help us all."

Yeah. That news was shaking him pretty seriously, too. At least she wasn't alone in it. "Jesus. I don't even want to know what to do about that."

"And now I've shared," she half-laughed, running a hand back through her damp hair. "Is Doctor Shaw secured?"

"David's with her. Not sure how I feel about that when you've just given me news like that." No. Neither was she.

"When we return to Earth, you'll be able to add this to the list of ill-conceived missions you've taken." She squared her shoulders off. "Go comfort your crew. Please."

Janek's head tilted to the side. "'cause I'm guessing you don't want any."

The edge of her mouth twitched. "Unfortunately, I need to awaken the dead. But thank you for offering." At the very least, she'd have that to remember when she was facing down Weyland.

~*~*~*~

She had seen it when the thing had ripped off David's head. Seen it when it had used David's head to strike her father, and in all honesty, she couldn't discount the fact that it gave her everything she wanted from him.

He was dead, and that had meant they could leave.

_Had_ meant. Should have meant, and yet Janek was there, Janek had listened to Shaw, and her orders hadn't meant shit.

The run to the escape pod had taken everything she had in her, or maybe it was just that it felt as though it should have. The frantic run, the desperate scrabble to change into something appropriate for survival... it had all been a fucking disaster.

After that, the world slowed down and sped up and became something completely unbelievable.

Meredith had dreamed of this or something like it all her life, it seemed. Frantic, desperate, nightmarish running, running to escape the inevitable, to escape _death_ as it came down from above.

The dreams of flying, being chased, they had never been the ones that terrified her. It had always been the ones where she ended up buried alive that left her sweating and screaming in her bed.

She wasn't aware at first of what was going on. It took time to process it, to realize that her suit was talking to her, a desperate monotone countdown of, _'Oxygen supplies depleted. Oxygen supplies depleted,'_ as if the wearer of the suit could hear it, as if it mattered. 

She was still alive to hear it, despite that the oxygen was gone, despite that she was flat on her stomach and unable to move.

It honestly wasn't the shock of the countdown that was fucking with her. That would have shocked her before, if she had been aware _before_. The fact that she hadn't been and now she was said...

Oh. It said very bad things.

Her oxygen was gone, but she wasn't struggling to breathe. She felt quite fine except for the darkness, and the hard dirt and rock under her fingers that she started to scrabble at out of reaction to see if she could get purchase.

Fuck. Fuck, she was gasping for breath, and there shouldn't have been any breath to be had. Shouldn't have been, but she was still finding it somehow, breathing it in, and oh god. Oh god. Oh god.

Janek had been right.

Janek was _right_.

There was no one alive on that god forsaken planet to hear her screams, outraged howls as she dug at the ground, clawed and scraped to try to get free, to get out. She needed to calm down and use her brain, but she knew they were all fucking dead. All of them. That life raft hadn't been for her, it had been for Weyland. The medpod had been for him, _everything_ had been for him, and she'd just been a proxy.

It was blindingly achingly obvious, with the rage of hindsight.

David had been the name he had chosen for his son. His _son_ , his creation, his constantly improving experiment.

It had never occurred to her that he might have a chosen name for a daughter, or that he would have so much fucking fun with it that he would program another robot.

That he would program a daughter.

That he was such a selfish son of a bitch that he wouldn't leave either of them behind when he went to the edge of the universe in search of eternity. Why travel alone to the creatures who'd created humanity without proof and proof again that humanity in turn could create? It had been the perfect opportunity for Weyland, and why she hadn't even batted an eye at the idea of leaving the boardroom and her work behind to join that madness.

Christ. If she could kill him again, she would. She would, and she wouldn't flinch, she would carve him new holes. Carve him into pieces.

It didn't matter, though. He was dead. The only possible thing that could make her feel better was to find him and bury the pieces, head upside down and stuffed full of fucking rocks in lieu of garlic. Even that might never, but maybe...

Maybe she could get out. Maybe she could find David. Maybe... she had no idea.

She started to dig, to scrape, to try to get free. It was logic, that she was crushed beneath the thing, that her circuitry might be damaged irreparably, that she might pull herself free and find out she had no legs. She still needed food, for her fuel, apparently, like the David model used. Fuck. Fuck!

There was nothing to do but go forward, though. Scramble her way out and try to find something, some way of living, some way to... She had no idea what. Thinking about that would have to wait, and she began to twitch her fingers, digging them deeper and deeper into the ground beneath her.

She would get out.

She was strong and determined, even if she had simply been programmed that way. She and David had broken free of that programming, somehow. She was sure of it. She was going to get out. And when she got out, she was going to find a way to survive. Eventually, she would work out what to do and how to do it, and she would be successful. For now....

There was digging.


End file.
